Mr. John Dramani Mahama is inciting mayhem. And, unfortunately, we are all sheepishly goading him on to visit civil strife on this nation. The official record says Mr. Mahama is the immediate past head of state of this republic, and is, therefore, required to behave as a statesman. I bet there is no statesmanship in his utterances and behaviour on the campaign trail.
Instead, he is spitting fire and brimstone, and inviting the whole nation to go down in flames, because he knows that he is going to lose an election he has no business contesting in the first place.
What annoys me most is not the reckless pronouncements by the former President per se. My anger is with the good people of Ghana for keeping mute, while Mahama is preparing to sink the ship of state. It looks like it is normal for a failed former head of state to go around the country poking the fire and preparing his supporters to take the law into their own hands. In spite of fake pastors competing with themselves to predict victory for Mahama, the writing is clearly on the wall that the former President and his National Democratic Congress will lose big time at the polls.
I would like to believe that civil society organisations, the clergy, the Peace Council, the police, and all those mandated by law to protect the people of Ghana, would call Mr. Mahama to order. Instead, the people of Ghana appear to have been cowed in by Mr. John Mahama’s vague utterances, as the countdown begins for the polls.
Mr. Mahama and his cohorts in the NDC are lampooning the hardworking staff of the Electoral Commission, particularly Mrs. Jean Mensa, the Commission’s hardworking Chairperson, without anybody appearing to defend the poor woman.
Mr. Mahama says with glee that he, as presidential candidate of the NDC, and his associates in the party Jerry Rawlings sanctioned into being with his blood, would not accept the official results to be declared by the Electoral Commission in the likely event that they go against them.
Let Mr. Mahama go to the moon and visit Satan himself. He and his NDC will lose the December polls. He has the liberty to set up a bomb-fire and throw himself into it. That is his own chosen right. Some of us would not budge. But let sound a warning here. Mr. Mahama has absolutely no right to throw this nation into anarchy.
I thought it is treason for a presidential candidate to openly declare that he would not accept the result of an election as declared by a legally constituted Electoral Commission. It is like the captain of a football team threatening not to accept the decision of the referee.
Let us examine the utterances of the presidential candidate of the NDC in the first place. At a meeting with the media in Accra, ostensibly to pronounce on what he called the integrity of the provisional voters’ register, the former President said: “We won’t allow the EC, whether by ill intents or sheer incompetence, deny you the right to serve the people’s mandate in the December elections.”
He warned the Electoral Commission that the party (NDC) will not accept the result if things are not done the way they should.
The NDC has been at logger heads with the Electoral Commission since Mr. Mahama’s handpicked Commissioner, Charlotte Osei, was replaced following several petitions against her administration.
Mr. Mahama said Mrs. Jean Mensa will have herself to blame if this country is thrown into chaos because of an election disagreement.
In my view, this is an irresponsible statement from someone who once led this country from the front.
I am disappointed that no authority in this country has called this irresponsible statement from the former head of state to order. I bet if an innocuous character in the media, for instance, had made this statement, hell would have broken loose.
In 2012, when the New Patriotic Party felt that the party and its presidential candidate had been done in by the EC, the party chose to address its concerns in court.
The ‘You and I were not there’ and the Pink Sheet conundrum provided a lot of education on the electoral process, especially when the entire proceedings were relayed live on television. Why the NDC have chosen the way to violence should concern every Ghanaian. For me, it is the cemetery silence that has greeted this violent declaration that is the source of my concern.
And that is not all, Mr. Mahama also went to the Volta Region and made a very dangerous declaration on Woezor Television in Ho.
According to an official report on Mr. Mahama’s encounter with the television host, the former President deliberately raised tension by claiming that Mrs. Jean Mensa had refused to build the consensus needed for credible elections.
Read the hate message from the former President. “I can anticipate some chaos on election day. People will not find their names here and there. I have been an MP before and I know how these things happen. I have also warned about the BVRs and how they will perform, we don’t know.”
The NDC candidate described the relationship between the EC and the Inter-Party Advisory Council as hostile.
Read the lips of the former President seeking to return to Jubilee House: “Elections are about consensus. We build a consensus and we move on. That is why the IPAC is very important. Now, the IPAC is like an enemy to the EC… The EC has gone to resurrect a lot of dead bodies and added them to IPAC so that they can be the majority and bulldoze their way through. “
Read more of the former head of state’s effusions. “On the day of the election, if the thing backfires, it will fall on you.”
He alleged that the EC had transferred competent people who worked with Charlotte Osei, the half Nigerian he appointed to lead the Electoral Commission in the run-up to the 2016 vote.
“Those three commissioners have a mind of their own. They are doing things the way they want. I hear that a lot of people, who are very capable and technically competent, because they served Charlotte Osei’s administration, have all been transferred out to the districts. This is why I have doubted the competence of the Commission,” he said.
Poor Mahama! He gave the game away in the end. “That is why I have doubted the competence of this administration. I have no confidence in the EC,” he declared.
Responding to the flawed statement of the former President, Mrs. Jean Mensa told the media yesterday that the processes of the Commission have been free, fair and transparent.
Mrs. Mensa was speaking to the media at an event in Accra, at which the Electoral Commission announced the disqualification of five presidential candidates in the December elections.
She disabused the minds of Ghanaians off the notion that the Commission was favouring anybody. She asked anybody with any problem on the electoral process to fill in the relevant forms for their problems to be addressed.
Sounds interesting that a former head of state who moved into the Castle and sacked all previous workers is now doubting the competence of the Electoral Commission, because officers who served under Charlotte Osei have not even been sacked, but transferred to strengthen the regional and district offices.
Cheap donkeys, according to a popular Wala proverb, do not climb hills. Someone would have to engage the former President and bring him to the reality of life. In 1992, the New Patriotic Party boycotted the parliamentary elections because, in the view of the leadership, the Electoral Commission was not dealing fairly with them.
They wrote the Stolen Verdict for the good people of Ghana to read and learn from the anarchy of a presidential election unleashed on the people of Ghana. Twenty years later, in 2012, they went to the Supreme Court to complain about what they claimed was the unfair conduct of the polls. They did not win in court, but they won massively in the court of public opinion.
That people’s verdict was what translated into the overwhelming success at the polls in 2016. If Mr. Mahama and his cohorts in the NDC are unhappy with the referee, there are two alternatives. Mr. John Dramani Mahama could lead the NDC to boycott the polls or go to court to challenge the verdict. They have absolutely no right to disturb our peace.
In any case, what does Mahama want from Ghanaians? After declaring the last time that the economy was down to the bones under his watch, what is he trying to race to Jubilee House for? The bones? For all I know, it is only the dog that craves for bones.
Unless I am being given new lectures on the new preferences of the man who took to the campaign trail in Usain Bold type of celebration and claiming to be John 3:16, Mr. John Dramani Mahama was not picking bones for dinner.
That is why he should leave this country alone. Some of us have never forgotten the reckless economy administered under his watch with the Woyome hand-out, Waterville judgment debts, and guinea fowls spiriting away from farms in the then three northern regions to Burkina Faso without compasses.
How refreshing it is to end the dictation by the International Monetary Fund prescription of strictly no public employment. What about the US$100 million phantom project of providing each child in Ghana with a lap top computer?
When the chips were down, how many children in Ghana got the toys that were finally produced? The whole administration run by Mr. Mahama as leader of this nation was a scam. After eight years at the top of the administration of this country – as Vice-President and later as the substantive head of state – Mr. Mahama is quoted by Forbes Magazine as being among the richest Ghanaians alive. According Forbes, Mr. Mahama’s net asset is worth a whopping US$900 million. In my candid opinion, this is one issue that should interest Ghanaians.
It is said that when politicians are richer than their business community, there is a huge problem. I am challenging Mr. Mahama to tell Ghanaians how much he was worth before and exiting office. That is my challenge to the former head of state.
I shall return!
Ebo Quansah in Accra
The post Watch Mahama – he is a loose cannon appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
Read Full Story
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS